What, you’re still reading. I am surprised!

OK, here is some background. HP Web JetAdmin is software that monitors network attached printers and provides alerts when certain conditions are met. For example, if the toner is low or there is a paper jam, it can alert you, allowing you to be proactive with support. It means that you can purchase toners when alerted rather than holding a large stock or being caught on the hop when all the colour printers are out and no-one has mentioned it until 5 minutes before a critical print job.

Anyway, we had been using this software for some years at work without any problems. You would just get the alert email with a summary of the issue and a link allowing you to open the admin interface in a web browser. Recently, we had some major network changes which resulted in the IP addresses being changed for all our network devices (including computers and printers). After the changes, and rediscovering the new printers (some of their details changed as well), the Web JetAdmin software continued to work as before. Unfortunately, this also included the link to open the admin interface. It was still using the old IP address which was no longer valid.

After ‘googling’ for the solution without luck, I tried several approaches, some of which got me into a bit of a mess with the database. In the end I got the software re-installed, only to find it was still hooked into the old database and the old information.

To cut to the chase, the solution is really simple. In the c:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\HP Web Jetadmin 10\WJABackupRestore folder run the backup script to produce a backup set. I had to modify the location of ‘set OSQL’ in the script due to a non-standard installation.

Once you have the backup, open the file ‘HP.Imaging.Wjp.Core.WebServer.config.xml‘ in the Settings\WjaService\config folder and modify the IP address to the new address.

e.g.
<property name=”HostIPv4Address”>
<type>HP.Imaging.Wjp.Sdk.Core.Framework.ConfigurationItemString</type>
<value>192.168.50.125</value>
</property>

Run the restore script and allow it to overwrite the existing database. I also had to modify the location of ‘set OSQL’ in this script due to my non-standard installation.

Your emails will now contain the correct link to launch the admin interface.

Hopefully this will save someone a lot of time.

I’ve had a look around at WordPress plugins and tried out two, WordPress Mobile Edition by Alex King and WordPress Mobile by Andy Moore. I used the demo of Opera Mini to assist me in my testing.

WordPress Mobile

The installation was a straight forward copy the file to the wordpress plugin folder and activate the plugin. Then under settings you can adjust some of the options including the predefined colour schemes. I chose blue to match with the general theme of my sites. The plugin has the functionality to add Admob Mobile Advertising and Google AdSense for Mobile adverts to the top and bottom of the pages, or at least it would have if the functions needed to make this work were enabled on my hosting.

It provided a clean rendering of the content of my site, by eliminating the sidebar contents and theme images. I did have problems with some errors at the top of the post pages:

Warning: imagesx(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 1869

Warning: imagesy(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 1870

Warning: cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php:1869) in /homepages/…./wp-content/plugins/wordpress-mobile.php on line 606

If you ignored the errors, the rest of the page loaded fine. Any comments on posts were shown on a separate link.

WordPress Mobile Edition

The installation caught me out, I should have read the readme file. You have to copy the file to the wordpress plugin folder and the wp-mobile folder to the themes folder, then activate the plugin. There are no settings to adjust, it just works.

Again, it also produce a clean, uncluttered version of my site by eliminating the same things. One thing I did like was that it included the comments to post on the same page and also displayed the Firestats extras (country, operating system and browser images) with the comment.

While I’m sure the issue with the errors on the post pages could have been resolved in the WordPress Mobile plugin, I don’t think it offered anything to me over the WordPress Mobile Edition one from Alex King. While checking out Alex King‘s site, I realised I was already using another of his plugins, Twitter Tools.

The upgrade was straight forward and all my plugins activated without any apparent issue. However, when I checked my stats, the page wouldn’t load any details, just a blank page. I have used FireStats since migrating to WordPress and had got used to the results it gives, so I headed over to the FireStats site to see if there was an upgrade. I found version 1.5.12 and so downloaded and installed it. To be on the safe side, I installed to a new database so that I didn’t have to upgrade my existing stats database. This didn’t resolve my blank stats page issue and gave me some messages about features needing a higher version of MySQL than my host 1and1 provides, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled my previous version 1.4.4.

I then tried turning all my plugins off, and brilliant, Firestats worked! I then started turning plugins back on and came to the conclusion that it worked fine with all except if AskApache Password Protect or WordPress Database Backup plugins were activated. Not so good, these were important plugins to me.

I looked at some alternate stats packages, but they weren’t FireStats, so yesterday morning I raised a ticket with the bug I had found on the FireStats site. Within minutes I’d had a reply from the developer, Omry Yadan, who suggested that it sounded like a memory issue and pointed me to a wiki entry about this and how to resolve it. After some more testing when I confirmed that Firestats, AskApache Password Protect and WordPress Database Backup would work together, I just couldn’t have all my plugins working and get to the admin/stats pages of FireStats, I had to agree with Omry. I tried increasing the memory limit using .htaccess as described in the wiki, but this caused a server 500 internal error, so that wasn’t an option. I then created a php.ini file with the memory limit statement in it and uploaded to the root of my test domain. According to phpinfo() this did increase the memory limit setting, however it didn’t resolve it.

I was unable to get to the server error logs, as 1and1 don’t allow access on shared hosting. Firestats tools showed that I had a memory limit of 40MB set even though I thought I had set higher in testing, so it didn’t look as if my settings were having any impact. I used the 1and1 code for creating my own error log to try to gather the error message when I was having the problem, and although I did get some logging, it wasn’t occuring when I was having the problem. The logging I did get was the same whether or not FireStats was allowing me access to the admin/stats pages (turning off other plugins to get access).

This needed a different approach to work around the problem. Even though I was unable to access the admin/stats pages on my test blog, the page views and hits were being logged correctly into the database. I have all my blogs set to use the same database tables for FireStats with different ids for each source, this means that from any Firestats interface I can view all statistics anyway. So I have installed a standalone copy of FireStats pointing to the same database and am able to view my stats from there.

The way I had worked until that point was a full install of FireStats in each WordPress blog, which I then configured to use the same database tables. This meant that each time I upgraded FireStats, I had to upload it seperately to each blog. The one downside of Firestats is its size, 3MB, so that’s a lot of upload time for multiple blogs. In a follow up email conversation with Omry, he suggested I install in satellite mode. This involves an install of Firestats seperate from WordPress (just done that -check), then instead of a full install of FireStats for each blog, it just needs 1 file in the plugins folder. This is configured in options to point to the standalone install and it just works. Any updates in the future only have to performed on the standalone copy and the new file put in plugins for your blogs. Brilliant.

I was very impressed by the support that Omry gave and will be following his advice to upgrade to version 1.5, which will be much easier now there is only one upload to do.

A couple of the add-ons I have been using are NoScript and IE Tab. NoScript is great as it prevent scripts running on a site unless you choose to allow them, this means that in cases of an advert laden webpage, most of them will not work unless you want them to. IE Tab is ideal for those sites that just will not work properly unless you are using Internet Explorer.

I have got so used to using Firefox, that it’s frustrating at work, where we still use IE6, when I use the keyboard shortcut to open a new tab.

Anyway, this post is about the release on Tuesday 17th June of Firefox 3. There is an attempt to set a world record for most software downloads in 24 hours. I have tried a couple of the beta versions of Firefox 3 and found it to be stable and fast, so I will be downloading the release version on Tuesday.

A problem I had been having with it was after waking my laptop from hibernation, the Microsoft connection would fail to reconnect. Yahoo would reconnect without problem, but Microsoft would keep trying for about 10 minutes before finally failing. If I did a Global Disconnect before hibernating and then a Global Reconnect after waking it up, then everything worked fine.

Well it worked fine providing I remembered to reconnect after waking up. This didn’t always happen, as my post a few days ago about my unexpected Plugoo message shows.

Looking at the logs for the MSN connection shows:

[20:46] *** Lost connection to network (Error Code: 10054).
[20:46] *** Reconnecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”
[20:46] *** Will attempt 10 connections with 60 second intervals.
[20:46] *** Failure resolving “messenger.hotmail.com”! Attempting to connect to a known server…
[20:46] *** Connecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”, attempt 1.
[20:46] *** Error while connecting (Error Code: 0). Disconnecting.
[20:48] *** Connecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”, attempt 2.
[20:48] *** Error while connecting (Error Code: 0). Disconnecting.
[20:49] *** Connecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”, attempt 3.
[20:49] *** Error while connecting (Error Code: 0). Disconnecting.
[20:50] *** Connecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”, attempt 4.
[20:51] *** Error while connecting (Error Code: 0). Disconnecting.

It appears that as the system comes out of hibernation, Trillian attempts to do a DNS lookup for messenger.hotmail.com. As the network connection hasn’t been re-established, the lookup fails and then it tries to connect to MSN using a different address. It never tries the lookup again and fails to get a response on the address it uses.

Checking the ip address for messenger.hotmail.com

nslookup messenger.hotmail.com
Server: xxxx.xxxxxxx.xxxxxx
Address: 192.168.1.3
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: dp.msnmessenger.akadns.net
Address: 65.54.239.20
Aliases: messenger.hotmail.com

This gave me the IP address 65.54.239.20 for messenger.hotmail.com

I then changed the entry for the MSN host in Trillian. In Trillian preferences, select Identities and Connections, select your Microsoft connection and press Change.

On the connection tab, I changed the host entry from messenger.hotmail.com to 65.54.239.20.

Since making this change, Trillian reconnects the Microsoft connection within a minute automatically after waking from hibernation.

Anyway, yesterday, being totally certain that I was up to date, I ran the Secunia website Software Inspector on our desktop and was surprised to find a few software applications showing as out of date. Adobe Flash player was a version behind and the previous version of SunJava was still installed despite the current version being installed. I have had this before with SunJava, as it doesn’t uninstall the old version when upgrading, so I should have remembered. The software inspector explains this and details how to resolve it (remove old versions from Add or Remove Programs).

My AntiVirus software, Avast, checks for updates every 4 hours and is set to audibly announce the updates. After a while you get used to the ‘Virus database has been updated’ message and I personally won’t turn it off. If you do not have current antivirus software or your existing software subscription is expiring, I would thoroughly recommend Avast, it is free for home use and the virus signatures are regularly updated, often a couple of times a day.

About 5 years ago in June 2002, I downloaded and installed the Seti@Home software. The Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project uses spare time on your computer to analyse the signals from the radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory searching for signs of intelligence.

In early 2005, a new version of the software was released. This version ran on the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) platform, which was design to be modular allowing clients for other purposes to be released. I’m still searching for aliens, but I’m also taking part in the following projects:

• ClimatePrediction – experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century
• Einstein – search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors
• Predictor – predict protein structure from protein sequence to address critical biomedical questions of protein-related diseases
• Rosetta – determine the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in research that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases

You can just do this individually or join one of the many teams that do this competitively. Being a bit of a nutter with a liking for Monty Python, I had to join The Knights Who Say Ni! team, who are without exception stark raving mad. This explains my name in the team; the Knights are searching for a Shrubbery and with the name Hedges what else could I be other than ‘I am a Shrub’.

I set up my film scanner and scanned the films in the same way as I had with previous films. However, the results I got were absolutely awful. Instead of a black sky with the moon, I had a very grainy mottled green/grey sky. As I already had a set of prints from when the film was developed, I knew what it should look like and my scans were not it.

When I had first installed the Dimage Scan software on my computer I had installed versions 1.0 and 1.1. For some reason I had problems with version 1.1 and was unable to save the images that I scanned using it. Version 1.0 worked and gave me good images and so keen to play with my new toy I ignored the problem with 1.1 and pressed on with using version 1.0. This was slow, taking about 10 minutes to scan an image, but I wrote this off as an investment to get the films into digital format. Of course this was over 2 years ago and so I had totally forgotton about version 1.1. Anyway, I ran up version 1.1 and scanned one of the moon images and it looked just like the print and nothing like the previous scan. So that was the good news, at least the scanner worked properly, I just had to be able to saved the better images.

I download the latest version from the Konica-Minolta website, uninstalled my copy and reinstalled it. Success, now I could save the scans.

There was another plus to this, using the new software, the time to scan a negative at the highest resolution I could (2800dpi) is only about 2.5 minutes. This meant that I was able to rescan the 26 images later that evening.

This then got me thinking, I had already scanned 10 films and burnt 6 to DVD for long term storage. Did this mean that there was better image possible from the films I had already scanned. So, I did some tests and when I looked in the shadows of the original scans compared to a new scan of the same image, I was able to see the same noise instead of black and a grainier image. The saving grace is that I have found this fairly on during my scans rather than 40 or 50 films in. As the scan speed is much quicker it shouldn’t take too long to get back to where I was before I discovered this.

Original scan
New scan

So anyway, after all that, my photos of the Lunar Eclipse March 2007 are up on my gallery.

The first two are the types of update that most people will consider.

Operating system patches.

I have Windows set to download the patches as they become available and notify me. I then usually install within the next couple of days.

Anti-Virus

This is set to download and install automatically. The Avast software I use checks every 4 hours to see if there are updates available.

But what about the other software that you have installed? You probably have things like Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, Java and a multitude of other applications which also have security issues and updates to resolve them. You may remember to update some of them, but are you sure you got them all? The Secunia website has a Software Inspector that will check your system for software versions and provide updates or links to the application website. The inspector requires Javascript enabled to work.

Even if you think your Windows system is up to date, it might be worth a check, it only takes a minute.

Anyway, I was checking my account balance yesterday and realised that I was nearly out, so I added more credit. I should have checked their tarrifs first as most of the rates have gone up. For example a UK landline call is now 1.5p per minute; this is however cheaper than my land line provider, VirginMedia, who charge 3p per minute plus a 6p connection charge. I checked the tarrifs for the other VoIP accounts that I have, VoipTalk and SipGate and found that for UK calls, Sipgate works out best for me. I have added credit to this account and changed the dial plan on my Linksys SPA-3000 adapter to use Sipgate for all UK calls and VoipCheap for all international calls.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an unexpected premium rate call on my land line bill. As I use Sipura 3000 System Tray Monitor to monitor the phone adapter, I was able to confirm that we had not made the call and get a refund.

After 9 months of using VoIP for all my calls from home I am very pleased with the results. I also get the benefit, when I add credit, of the free international calls. If you are reading Lyall, I’ll try to call you next weekend.